PMX Selection Help

Is there a way to select all the bones/joints/vertex/etc of a part of a model? I feel like this function must exist in some form but I can't figure it out unless I'm misunderstanding the mechanics of the models entirely. For example, adjusting hair I've put on a model and after testing it I notice its slightly out of place and I can't select just the hair without picking parts of the body out to then adjust the hair into a new place.

So yeah, every model is separated into "materials," basically parts like skin, hair, clothes, etc. Everything in one material follows the same rules for how they are drawn such as what texture file it uses, outline settings, how lighting works, if faces are drawn on both sides. In the view window, look for buttons labeled "Msk" and "G." The first opens a window that lets you check which materials are drawn and which are not. The other one lets you save your selection so you can easily select it again. Also, you can hit Ctrl-R after selecting vertices to hide them.

For bones I don't know of any tool yet that could make it easier to select bones but it's pretty easy already if you just select them in the main pmx window. For bodies and joints, one of the plugins pre-installed should be something like body/joint selector tool which lets you make bodies and joints invisible. Bodies are separated into groups which are represented by different colors. You can disable drawing any of the groups so you can then only view, say, the group used for the hair. Joints don't have groups but you can at least make the joints you don't want to look at invisible which is very useful when dealing with lots of joints. Make all joints invisible in that plugin and then find only the joints you want visible to turn back on.

I've found it useful, when adjusting physics, to keep separate physical elements in different files. For example, I might have my hair in one file and my skirt in another file. That makes it easier for me to manage the bodies and joints. When I'm happy, it's easy enough to merge all the files.

Another thing I do is keep my physics attached to anchor bones. So instead of parenting my hair strands directly to the head, I'll parent them to a hair master bone which is parented to the head. That way, anytime I need to separate off the hair, I can move the hair master bone in the transform window and save the transformed model to give me a single cleanly selectable chunk that has all of the bones, verts, joints, and bodies.

When it comes to smoothly moving things like hair, it doesn't matter a whole lot where the bones are as long as they're reasonably centered inside the strand, you shouldn't be moving the bones after weighting things to them, and you should probably be using automatic tools to weight them (skirt plugin, Blender's automatic weights). The joints ought to go directly on top of the bones, more than nine times out of ten, and the bodies might get rotated or resized, but it's not a good idea to move their center of gravity off the line running from each bone to the next. I'm saying this because if you're spending a lot of time editing this stuff, you might be barking up the wrong tree. Not that I haven't done that :)

Thanks for the explanations, I forgot about how the editor has differing dropdown menus to the viewer for one. If I'm understanding this correctly, in my situation, I'd want to create a master bone for the part then when/if I need to I simply edit through the transform view rather than the normal viewer. Definitely seems like I was going about things the wrong way in this case. That's what I get for editing late into the night though at the same time mistakes like this always seem to stick with me when learning something, so its good and bad.